Just a month ago, three judges required the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police to adopt “urgently” measures to put an end to the “overcrowding” suffered by 250 asylum seekers – among whom there were 19 minors – who remained held in different lounges at Barajas airport (Madrid).
Far from being resolved, the chaos in the management of the asylum in Barajas has become a problem for Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska.
What was a marginal way to request protection in Spain has become in a few months a resource that hundreds of people, of more and more nationalities, are exploring.
From December 1 to January 15 alone, 847 applications for international protection were processed at the Madrid airfield, an unprecedented number.
And there is no solution in sight.
At the moment, Spain has imposed a transit visa on citizens with a Kenyan passport since Saturday.
It is a way of trying to stop the constant arrival of Somalis who stopped in Spain and requested asylum with documentation from that country.
By requiring this requirement that only allows transit through the international zone of airports, where asylum can be requested, the filter is toughened and the traveler who wants to stopover in Spain is obliged to complete a series of procedures.
But in recent weeks the number of Senegalese and Moroccans who are also using this route has stood out.
The Minister of the Interior said on Friday during his visit to Rabat that he would study what measures to take regarding transit visas, something that is the responsibility of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“If transit visas have to be introduced, they will be introduced in their proper form to avoid these uses,” he declared.
But Spain has close relations with both countries, and that makes it difficult to impose this requirement on its citizens to make a stopover at Spanish airports.
Interior sources rule out that it will be requested, at least, for Moroccans.
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400 euros for a passport to seek refuge in Spain
The constant arrival of travelers who have taken advantage of their stopover in Madrid to request asylum has caused recurring scenes of overcrowding in the three rooms at the airport that are designed to accommodate this profile, while it is being studied whether or not their application will be accepted for processing.
The unsanitary conditions of these spaces have provoked complaints from police unions, such as the Unified Police Union (SUP), and the videos that have emerged have shown dirt, crowds and bedbugs in spaces where minors also live.
In recent days, Interior has ended up assuming the cleaning and disinfection tasks.
Added to the accommodation conditions were two escapes two weekends ago: at least 26 people, all Moroccans, according to police sources, escaped from the airport lounges.
They had been waiting for a response to their request for at least 20 days.
There is no news about most of them.
Asylum seekers in one of the rooms at the Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas airport, on Thursday.
To alleviate congestion, the Ministry of the Interior asked a judge for authorization to transfer fifty asylum seekers to the Foreigners Internment Center (CIE), the place where immigrants are locked up before being returned to their homes. countries of origin.
The judge accepted the transfer on Tuesday, but the Prosecutor's Office requested the annulment of the court order two days later.
“It is not possible, in general, to agree to the detention of asylum seekers in the CIE,” the prosecutor maintained.
The public ministry understood that the condition of asylum seekers cannot be equated to that of foreigners in an irregular situation and, therefore, a detention center was not the appropriate place to house them.
And the judge overturned his own decision.
“This court lacks jurisdiction to decide on the dependency in which asylum seekers must wait for the resolution of their application,” he maintains in the new order.
According to sources present at the airport, about 300 people remained there on Friday.
Although the police personnel dedicated to interviews have been reinforced, the lack of officers to handle such a volume of requests is extending the deadlines to the point that the waits, which should be between 4 and 14 days, end up reaching a month.
The airport has now concentrated all the spotlights, but the Spanish asylum system has been on the brink of collapse for years.
In 2023 alone, 166,220 people requested asylum, most of them already within Spanish territory.
They are mainly Venezuelans, Colombians and Peruvians who enter Spain as tourists.
The reinforcements that the ministry has dedicated to the Asylum and Refuge Office have not been sufficient to quickly manage the files and guarantee that interested parties can access the procedure: delays can reach two years (when they should not exceed six months ), and getting an appointment at a police station to request protection is a herculean task.
The current scenario in Barajas has been brewing for months.
Already in summer, as EL PAÍS revealed, alerts were raised due to the high number of people with Kenyan passports who appeared in Barajas asking for asylum.
In reality, they were not Kenyans, but Somali refugees, who with passports purchased for a few hundred euros, took a plane to travel to Latin America with a stopover in Spain.
Upon arriving in Madrid, or upon being returned to their destination, they went to the National Police to request asylum.
Among the foreigners there are, therefore, refugees from decomposing countries, such as Somalia, but in recent weeks the gap has opened and dozens of Moroccans and Senegalese have arrived, whose situations do not necessarily meet the conditions to receive protection.
In the case of these nationalities, the police report that they had destroyed their documentation, which, on the one hand, allows them to simulate another nationality with more possibilities of receiving protection and, on the other, makes their expulsion difficult once their request is rejected.
In any case, without passports, the true nationalities of those arriving are unclear.
Appearance of one of the rooms for asylum seekers in Barajas after cleaning (Image provided by the Ministry of the Interior).
Minister Grande-Marlaska has spoken of “fraudulent use of airport stopovers,” while police sources speak directly of “tortious use of the asylum.”
The Unified Police Union has been blunt in its criticism of airlines for not controlling the profile of their passengers and, above all, in their demand to impose transit visas on citizens of countries that are using the airport to stay in Spain.
It is not new.
Every time a specific nationality has attracted attention for requesting asylum at a Spanish airport, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has imposed transit visas to avoid this.
It happened in 2011 with Syrian citizens;
in 2018, with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon;
in 2020, with Yemenis;
in 2021, with Haitians;
in 2022, with Turks;
and in 2023, with Burkinabe.
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